I'm Dave to my friends, and I do get on a bit don't I?

Thanks for that.

I think you'd be better served by addressing individual problems with individual brainstorms. Lumping many issues together is likely to become something of an unstructured mess.

I'd be proud if I produced Modest, so - sure. Modest is usable now, it's easy to navigate and generally a good early effort - its first appearance was in diablo, right? That much said, I'd certainly agree that there is room for improvement. I share your frustration with new mail notification, and wish for imap-idle support (really, a tinymail issue) and other things.